Indigenous Rights, Transnational Activism, and Legal Mobilization: The Struggle of the U’wa People in Colombia

Indigenous Rights, Transnational Activism, and Legal Mobilization: The Struggle of the U’wa People in Colombia

Description

In an ironic twist, one of the most powerful challenges to globalization has come from the indigenous peoples whose localized, ‘‘pre-modern’’ existence was supposed to have crumbled under the pressure of modern capitalist projects—from that of the colonial project to that of the ‘‘development project’’. Encapsulating the clashing forces of this historical short-circuit, the plight and transnational resistance of indigenous peoples expose with unique clarity the cultural, political, and legal issues at stake in the confrontation between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic globalization. Several reasons explain the visibility and importance of the indigenous peoples in such a confrontation. First, the indigenous movement involves populations historically subjected to the cruelest forms of exclusion. In Latin America, depending on the area, between 50 and 90 percent of the indigenous population died during the first century of the Spanish conquest, and few tribal groups survived the assimilationist policies of the postcolonial states. Today, albeit comprising the majority or a large portion of the population in several countries (71 percent in Bolivia, 66 percent in Guatemala, 47 percent in Peru, and 38 percent in Ecuador), indigenous peoples continue to be ‘‘the poorest of the poor’’. In Guatemala, while 53.9 percent of the population is poor, 86.6 percent of indigenous people fall under the poverty line. The gap is similar in Mexico, where 80.6 percent of the indigenous population is poor, as well as in Peru 79 percent) and in Bolivia (64.3 percent). Thus, if counter-hegemonic globalization focuses on the populations most harmed by hegemonic globalization (Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito’s chapter in this volume), then the struggle of indigenous peoples is one of its core components. Moreover, as we explain below, the rise of the transnational indigenous movement is explicitly rooted in a reaction against the expansion of the frontiers of predatory forms of global capitalism into new territories (e.g. the Amazon) and economic activities (e.g. the commercial exploitation of traditional knowledge and biodiversity). This expansion, in turn, is linked to the pressures to step up the exploitation of natural resources associated with increasing consumption in the North and economic dependence in the South. The examination of the indigenous movement thus allows us to see the new frontiers of neoliberal globalization and of the resistance to it. The indigenous cause illustrates two particularly promising features of the global justice movement. On the one hand, it illustrates the combination of struggles and scales of mobilization that characterizes counter-hegemonic globalization. Indigenous peoples raise claims for self-determination and land that vindicate local customs, laws, and ancestral territories. However, in pursuing these local claims they have not only mobilized globally in alliance with indigenous peoples and transnational indigenous rights organizations but have also joined forces with the global environmentalist movement, the struggle of national ethnic minorities and other counter-hegemonic movements. By bridging movement frames and issues, indigenous peoples have challenged hegemonic actors at every scale, from local colonists and discriminatory national states to transnational corporations (TNCs) seeking to exploit natural resources in their homelands. On the other hand, the fact that the indigenous movement is identity-based brings into relief the distinctively cultural dimension of counter-hegemonic globalization—that is, the fact that global social movements are as much about difference as they are about equality. Indeed, the iconic character of the Zapatista struggle (and the indigenous movement writ large) within the global justice movement lies in its capacity to bring together the aspiration to economic justice (as evident in its launching on the occasion of the entering into force of NAFTA in 1994) and the aspiration to ethnic, racial, and gender justice. The very location of the indigenous cause at the crossroads of different movements, scales, and historical trajectories that accounts for its visibility and importance also explains its difficulties. Therefore, the study of the indigenous movement in action illustrates some of the main tensions and contradictions within counter-hegemonic globalization. Among them are the differences between the time frames and the agendas of Northern NGOs and indigenous peoples, and the ambiguous effects of the judicialization of indigenous rights struggles. Finally, and particularly important for the purposes of this chapter, the transnational mobilization of indigenous peoples has unleashed a process of legal innovation with profound implications for national constitutional systems and the international human rights regime. Centered on the recognition of collective rights and embodied by myriad constitutional reforms and new international legal instruments, this ‘‘renaissance of indigenous peoples for the law’’ has shaken the individualist and Western-centric tenets of liberal legal thought and institutions and holds out the prospect for a cosmopolitan reconstruction of human rights. In this chapter, we examine the connection between politics and law in the transnational indigenous movement. To that end, we offer a case study of the struggle of the U’wa, an indigenous people of 5,000 members living in northeastern Colombia, against oil drilling in their territory. Waged in collaboration with national and transnational environmentalist NGOs and indigenous rights and human rights organizations, the decade-long, ongoing campaign of the U’wa people against Occidental Petroleum (Oxy) and the Colombian government vividly illustrates the potential and the limitations of transnational political mobilization in support of indigenous rights. Given that the struggle has revolved around the interpretation of the U’wa’s collective right over territory, it has crucially involved judicial and quasi-judicial institutions (from the Colombian Constitutional Court and Council of State to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the International Labour Organization) advancing contrasting discourses and agendas on law and human rights. Our analytical focus is twofold. First, we examine the connection between local, national, regional, and global contentious mobilization in support of the U’wa. Thus, we give especial attention to the transformation of the membership, strategies, and impact of the pro-U’wa coalition as it shifted from the local and national scales to the regional and global scales—and then, in a ‘‘boomerang effect’’, returned to Colombian political and legal venues. Secondly, we engage the nascent literature on the role of law in counter-hegemonic globalization (see Santos and Rodríguez-Garavito’s chapter in this volume) by focusing on the distinctively legal strategies of the U’wa coalition and assessing the potential and limitations of such strategies for the advancement of the U’wa cause and the movement for global justice writ large. The chapter is organized as follows. In the first section, we locate the U’wa struggle in the broader economic, political, and legal context of the turn to neoliberalism and the rising indigenous movement in Latin America. In the second, we zero in on the U’wa campaign as it has unfolded in national and international settings. In the third section we step back to assess the achievements and limitations of the campaign along our two analytical axes. Finally, we offer some conclusions.

Source Publication

Law and Globalization from Below: Towards a Cosmopolitan Legality

Source Editors/Authors

Boaventura de Sousa Santos, César A. Rodríguez-Garavito

Publication Date

2005

Indigenous Rights, Transnational Activism, and Legal Mobilization: The Struggle of the U’wa People in Colombia

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